Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Doctor And The Dinosaurs-Mike Resnick

The Doctor And The Dinosaurs
Mike Resnick
Pyr, Dec 10 2013, $18.00
ISBN: 9781616148614
In 1885 as John L. Sullivan comes from the east, emaciated dentist Doc Holliday cannot enjoy the boxing festivities since his entire focus in on his next breathe while dying from Consumption at the Leadville Sanitarium. The once deadly shooter’s companion Kate Elder has begun auctioning off his dental equipment as he has less than a week left.
While Doc wheezes, Theodore Roosevelt and Apache medicine man Geronimo sign a treaty that allows whites to enter the previously forbidden West. However the ink is not dry on their pact when two bitter rivals Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh arrive in search of dinosaur bones. Neither adversarial paleontologist cares about the fact that where they dig might upset the local population as long as they achieve greater finds than the other. When both desecrate holy burial grounds, irate Comanche medicine men angrily inform Geronimo they will reanimate dinosaurs to dine on these despicable miscreants. Fearing the medicine men may lose control of the dinosaurs leading to unintended consequences of the beasts feasting on their respective tribes, Geronimo offers Holliday a deal he cannot refuse. In return for one year of good health, Doc, using any means necessary, rids the west of these two odious desiccators.
The latest Weird West fantasy (see The Buntline Special) is an enjoyable thriller even with a thin storyline based on the real “Bone Wars” feud between Cope and Marsh. The cast is strong; especially Doc with his graveyard humor adding fun to an engaging clash between the American worship of the manifest destiny of science and the tribes’ belief in the cultural heritage of their magic; with dinosaurs uninterested in either human tenet.
Harriet Klausner